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Sandy Wyndham
In the short story Beauty and the Beast, Sandy Wyndham was an ex-R.F.C. pilot turned coconut planter in the South Seas who persuaded Biggles and Algy to join him in a pearling adventure. Sandy Wyndham had served in 207 Squadron during the 1st World War. According to Biggles, he fell off a wind-stocking pole after shooting down a blue-nosed Fokker over Hamel (the Fokker was changed to a Heinkel in the post 1950 editions), The fall broke both of Sandy's legs and he was invalided out of service. Following this, Sandy took up rubber planting in Malaya but the venture went wrong. He then took up a job at one of the trading posts of the North Equatorial Company where he made some money trading in copra and shell. After amassing enough capital, he started his own coconut plantation on the island of Rarotayo in the Tonga group. In Fair Cargo, Sandy was returning from leave in England, He had read of the exploits of BIggles and Algy. He wrote to them asking if they were interested in some "easy money". Subsequently, in the opening section of Beauty and the Beast, he met Biggles and Algy at Panama where he told them how his head boy Tauri had found a lagoon at the atoll of The Kaisora which seemed to be full of pearl oyster shell. Thje lagoon was totally enclosed by coral reef and ships could not enter but it would be easy for an amphibian or flying boat to land in the calm waters inside. Biggles and Algy agreed to join Sandy in a sortie to gather pearl shell from Kaisora. They shipped their Vickers Vandal amphibian to Rarotayo and from there set off for Kaisora which was some forty miles distant. Tauri was taken along as a diver while Smyth took Sandy's boat to patrol the waters between Kaisora and Rarotayo as a safety measure. After arriving in Kaisora, Tauri commenced diving and soon brought up several loads of shell. But the operation was interrupted when the aircraft was attacked by a giant octopus which inhabited an abyss at the deep end of the lagoon. There followed some harrowing moments which left Algy and Tauri left behind on the coral atoll but which was finally settled with a few sticks of dynamite Sandy had at Rarotayo (see here for details). The expedition yielded a number of valuable pearls but there would be no more. Tauri would not be willing to dive in the lagoon again nor was Biggles inclined to further risk his aircraft being threatened by the giant octopus. A month later, Sandy introduced Biggles and Algy to Sven Ericson, a Swedish inter-island trader who had called at Rarotayo. Ericson persuaded Biggles and Algy to join him in a search for a fabled "Bob's Box" on board a sunken vessel, the Southern Star. From the text, it would appear that Sandy did not join them in this adventure. Category:People Category:Interwar era characters Category:Biggles characters